13.7 Lyrics
The memory of ballad singers and tellers of epic poetry has been the focus of a
great deal of recent research. On the surface, their memory capacity seems un-
believable for the amount of detail they can readily access. But Wanda Wallace
and David Rubin of Duke University have shown that in fact these performers
do not need to rely on remembering every detail, because the structures of
songs and poems provide multiple constraints for the lyrics (Wallace and Rubin
1988a, 1988b). These constraints are based in part on rhyme, rhythm, allitera-
tion, melodic emphasis, style, and story progression. As an example of lyric
constraints, word phrases tend to have a unique stress pattern, such as weak-
strong or strong-weak. Similarly, melodic phrases tend to be characterized
by strong-weak or weak-strong patterns of accents. Thus, changing a word se-
quence could alter an entire line’s rhythm.
Wallace and Rubin found that from one telling to another, minor alterations
in the lyrics occur within these constraints. In a study of eleven singers per-
forming the same ballad on two different occasions, they found that most of the
lyric variations conformed to poetic and semantic constraints of the ballad. For
example, many lyric changes are to synonyms or other words that do not affect
the meaning, rhyme, or rhythm:
(a) ‘‘Can’t you shovel in a little more coal’’ becomes
(a^0 ) ‘‘Saying shovel in a little more coal’’; or
(b) ‘‘She cried, ‘Bold captain, tell me true’’’ becomes
(b^0 ) ‘‘She cried, ‘Brave captain, tell me true.’’’
The lyrics and storyline together provide multiple redundant constraints to
assist the recall of a passage. For example, even without music, given the first
line of the following rock song, the last word of the second line is relatively
easy to infer:
‘‘Well, today a friend told me the sorry tale
As he stood there trembling and turning———
He said each day’s harder to get on the scale.’’
(From A. Mann, ‘‘Jacob Marley’s Chain,’’ 1992)
The correct word to end the second line is ‘‘pale.’’ Similarly, if one could re-
call the entire second line except for the word ‘‘pale,’’ semantic constraints leave
few alternatives. When one adds the contribution of melodic stress patterns,
itbecomesapparentthatourrecallofsonglyricsisassistedbyanumberof
constraints.
The experimental data corroborate our intuition that the memory represen-
tation for lyrics seems to be tied into the memory representation for melody
(Serafine, Crowder, and Repp 1984). Further evidence of this comes from a case
report of a musician who suffered a stroke caused by blockage of the right ce-
rebral artery. After the stroke, he was able to recognize songs played on the
piano if they were associated with words (even though the words weren’t be-
ing presented to him), but he was unable to recognize songs that were purely
instrumentals (Steinke, Cuddy, and Jacobson 1995).
Memory for Musical Attributes 301